


ever since, ever since, ever since

by shinyhappyfitsofrage



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, idiots pining for 7 + years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-12 08:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10486641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/shinyhappyfitsofrage
Summary: she searches for a word to describe the way he loves her and the only one that fits is 'relentlessly'.(or: scully realizes nine times over that mulder may in fact love her)





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is a catharsis of sorts for me, really; i watched all of the x-files in like six weeks (except season 10 which i REFUSE to watch because i didn't wait 9 seasons for mulder & scully to bone just to have them broken up) and i sort of am suffering now and needed to do something to get these characters out of me so. here you go. it wasn't what i intended.
> 
> i'm sorry for the "want to believe" plugged in there, i really tried to avoid it.

_i._

Reasonably, she knows it has absolutely nothing to do with her.

She has to tell herself this multiple times during that first year. After that, her mantra becomes utterly unnecessary and also simply inapplicable, because after that  _everything_  has to do with her, and him, and them, like they're the star at a middle of a violent, violent solar system. But that first year is different. That first year, before she knows him more resolutely than she knows herself, she wonders, and she marvels, and she quietly, oh so shamefully  _pines_.

Not that he helps. Scully might've been able to forget about it the first day if he didn't drop so many breadcrumbs. It's the quiet smiles he gives her when she snaps a case file shut with a brisk sort of finality, even though she knows damn well he's going to open it twenty minutes later with a ghost story on his lips. It's him sitting behind the desk, glasses on the verge of slipping off his nose, and says her name brightly. "Morning, Scully." Like it’s the first sentence he utters after every sunrise. 

It's the motel room in Bellefleur, his hands on her back. He leaves fingertips on the band of her underwear. She's sure the candle burnt her neck.

It's because he's been locked in the basement so long, she chides herself for the thousandth time. You're the only actual human being he interacts with. Of course he looks at you like that. Of course he smiles at you like that.

The taste of  _but maybe_ , of  _but he might_  burns her tongue. 

_ii._

"Your partner," says Melissa, and then cuts herself off, shaking her head. "He's - something."

Scully isn't really paying attention. She stands in front of her bookshelf with pursed lips, running her fingers over the spines. Someone has rearranged them, she's sure of it. She had them in alphabetical order before she-  _left_. Whatever the word was. She doesn't like abducted because it is a hint too sensationalized, suggesting torrid details that don't exist. Or that she can't recall. All she remembers is the trunk of the car, and then something light. Something white.

Now,  _Moby Dick_  sits comfortably in between  _Pride & Prejudice_ and  _Gray's Anatomy_. She sighs. "Mulder." It's definitely his fault. No one else would've been in her apartment. There's a twinge of  _something_ , a discomfort that comes from the image of him, unshaven, rearranging books in the place where she used to exist, looking for traces of her in someone else's words. She buries it under a  _tsk_  and a flash of annoyance. She will tell him later to stay out of her things, with absolutely no conviction. Dutifully, he ignores her.

"Yes. Mulder.  _Fox_ ," says Melissa, dragging his name out. Scully turns to look at her sister, who's perched on the arm of the couch. Unlike her mother, unlike her partner, her sister very easily let go of the hospital bed, the thoroughness of her will, the month of nothing. Melissa has a rueful grin on her face and her hands are clasped in front of her, and it’s like no time has passed ( _of course, for Scully, it hasn’t: she went to sleep and woke up. She hadn’t been prepared to be mourned_ ).

She pulls out  _Moby Dick_ , moving it back to its proper place on the shelf. "What about Mulder?" she asks blandly. 

"He's in love with you."

"He is not." A phantom limb, a remainder of her stupid, childish infatuation with him from last year, throbs. She feels move along her collarbone, left to right. 

"He was unhinged when you showed up in the hospital.”

"He's unhinged in general."

“Apparently started yelling at the doctors, demanding someone explain what happened to you. Mom said security had him removed."

“Yes, well, that’s pretty typical, Mulder –“

"He wore your necklace until you came back."

This is new information. Scully lifts a hand to her throat, runs her fingers along the chain. There had been such an odd look in his eyes when he'd pressed it into her palm, an intense sort of uncertainty that had confused her. Like he was asking for forgiveness.

Melissa hops off the couch, sauntering up behind her. "Had it with him at all times," she says, victorious. "Sometimes when we were with you he would just -  _hold_  the cross. Like he thought it would bring you back. Like he was praying."

"He wasn't praying," says Scully, automatically, so used to setting his record straight for him that it's an instinct. Mulder hadn't been to a mass since he was seventeen, hadn't believed in God since He lifted his little sister into the sky. "He's an atheist."

She can hear Melissa shake her head. "I could _feel_ him, Dana. Maybe he doesn't now, but - then, in that room. He wanted to believe."

As Scully goes to sleep that night, she tries her best to imagine her necklace around Mulder's neck, the cross resting against his chest. His heartbeat against hers, if she thinks about it just right. If she squints.

_iii._

He insists that they stop for ice cream on the way to the airport, despite her repeated cries that it's January in Massachusetts, that they  _just_  ate lunch half an hour ago, that they are going to miss their flight back to Washington. Every protest only makes his determination more unwavering. He whistles something - _Bach_ , of all things - under his breath as he drives, scanning the signs on the side of the highway for the ice cream parlor he dreamed up twenty minutes ago on a whim.

"You're being annoying on purpose," she accuses him, a scowl on her face, her arms crossed petulantly. 

He only laughs in response, which is even more aggravating. She flies all the way to Massachusetts ( _he didn't make you_ ), drives all the way to Miller's Falls ( _you didn't have to_ ), just to watch him miss being blown up in a fiery factory explosion by mere seconds and fawn unabashedly over some woman with a cockroach obsession ( _you came of your own accord_ ). And he has the nerve to be chipper, and he has the nerve to think only of ice cream.

"It’s a thank you," he says, by way of explanation.

"For  _what_ , Mulder?"

He shrugs. She gets the sense he didn't feel he would have to say anything else. It's been more than two years and Scully wonders if she will ever really understand him.

They finally stop at a McDonald's, a compromise, with an hour to go before their flight takes off. She taps her foot impatiently as Mulder spends an impossible length of time debating whether or not to get a milkshake or a cone, going through the pros and cons of each out loud. The cashier looks as though she might quit on the spot. Scully can relate.

"And for you, Scully?" he asks, a smug, debonair smile on his face, like he's a damn gentleman for buying her a soft serve ice cream cone at a rest stop. Not to mention he's aware of it as well, proud of his own chivalry. In a couple months, she'll complain about some backwater town they're stuck in as they chase down figments, poor imitations of figments no less, and he'll raise a finger and say,  _I guess we're even for the ice cream I bought you in January_ , to which she'll waspishly point out that if he hadn't dragged her to Miller's Falls, Massachusetts ( _he didn't make you, you didn't have to, you came of your own accord_ ), he wouldn't have felt like he had to buy her an ice cream in the first place. And to which he'll say, to which, to which, to which, on and on, until they arrive back in that basement office, a hand extended, a lack of typical pleasantries. An excess of beginning. Of prophecy.

Scully sighs. "Kiddie vanilla," she says, directing it past him at the bewildered cashier. Mulder pays with what can only be described as glee.

_iv._

It’s not a coincidence that this is the year he chooses to suddenly remember her birthday.

This is blatantly true to anyone who is paying the even slightest bit of attention. A cancer diagnosis, a down payment on a gravestone, and suddenly he’s taking her out to dinner. He’s pretending the carefully selected key chain in the carefully wrapped box is something he just grabbed on the way to the restaurant. He’s smiling at her from behind sparklers. It all falls together too neatly, too perfectly, like an epic poem, like one of the great Shakespearean tragedies. Beautiful, finite. Pathetic.

But she plays along. She rolls her eyes at the spectacle he’s making and does her best to blow out the sparkler ( _Can you even blow out sparklers? Or do they just – fizzle out, when they’ve run out of tinder?)._ “That’s how I like to celebrate them, every four years,” he says, grinning sheepishly. Like leap years.

There’s a lump of irrational anger, a secondary tumor that climbs its way into her throat. She likes to think that she was born on a February 23rd but she will die on a February 29th. A leap day, a purely theoretical date, existing outside of the usual calendar. They are safe as long as it’s any of the other three years. So she doesn’t talk about the hospital gowns brushing the tops of her knees or the taste of iron dripping onto her upper lip any more than she did before. He doesn’t ask her how she’s doing or ask her to sit out on this one or to maybe consider taking some time off, some time for herself. He doesn’t touch her any more than he did before.

Sometimes she wishes he would. _God,_ how she wishes he would. Grab, grasp, pull, push, hold, embrace. Rough, gentle. Something in between. It doesn’t matter. She stares at him in their basement office, underneath everything, and wonders why she ever gave a fuck about protocol. _I’m dying!_ She wants to scream at him, wants to shake him by his collar. _Can’t you see? Can’t you see this is our last chance?_

If he touched her it would be something beyond the past three years. An acknowledgement of time past, of moments shared. Something new. She sits on her hands to stop herself from doing anything stupid and she’s thankful that he does the same. It’s the only thing that keeps her sane.

Until her birthday. Leap year. Suddenly she has six days left to live. Or a month, or two, or three – what matters is that she is reminded that it is finite. Beautiful, but finite. Pathetic, and finite.

When she finally gets back to her apartment, after Max, after the plane crash, after the bodies, she takes out the key chain and places it on her kitchen table. Mulder’s lie about it being a haphazard gift was never going to stick. She wonders at one point did pretending it wasn’t the fourth year become unbearable for him. Did buying her a birthday gift for the first and last time kill him? Does he know it’s going to kill her?

An epic tragedy, in three-fourths time.

_v._

“Mulder?”

“Scully. I didn’t know you were awake.”

“Are you leaving?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m… I might have a lead.”

 _Soft._ “Mulder. Don’t.”

“There’s a lab in Texas –“

“Please don’t do this. Please. Don’t – goddamnit, Mulder. Not everything – not everything can be fixed, okay?”

“If I can save you, Scully, if there’s even a _chance_ , then you know I have to –“

“You _don’t_ have to. I’ve accepted it, my mother, my brothers, but you can’t. Why?”

“You aren’t meant to die. Not like this. Not now.”

“It doesn’t fucking matter what I’m _meant_ to do. What matters is that I’m here, and I have… I have moments, Mulder, moments. And you’re not - you’re not _here…_ ”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Sometimes… sometimes people die, Mulder.” _Softer_. “Can you stay? Please?”

“Scully –“

 _Softest_. “Mulder.”

He holds her hand until morning.

_vi._

At about one am, he says into her hair, “What if we were married?”

Scully had just barely drifted off to sleep before he speaks. She’d originally banished him to the couch downstairs ( _this is an assignment, Mulder, this is the FBI, Mulder, this is you and me, Mulder_ ), but he’d slunk back up an hour later, complaining about his back and the stiffness of the cushions.

“You slept on a couch for years,” she’d pointed out, opening one eye to take in the pitiful image of Mulder, tired at midnight, clutching a pillow to his chest and begging to be let into her bed. She’d bit back a smile as she burrowed deeper into the blankets, turning away from him, relishing for once having the upper hand over him.

“I’m old now,” he’d said, almost whining. When she didn’t reply immediately, he had taken it as, if not outright approval, tolerance of his presence, and had clumsily climbed into the bed, dropping the pillow onto the mattress with a _whumph_. “You won’t even know I’m here,” he had promised, as he had inadvertently pulled the blankets off her shoulders so he could wrap them around his broad frame. She’d grunted and tugged back, but all she’d succeeded in doing is pushing her body closer to his. Her feet brushed his knees. His breath hit her neck.

You won’t even know I’m here. What a fucking liar. From midnight to one am ( _She vaguely remembers later that specific hour is what Mulder refers to as ‘the witching hour’, the time when paranormal phenomena were most likely to occur. She hadn’t believed him then. Now she isn’t so sure_ ) he is all she knows. She clutches the sheet in her hand, feeling the fabric spill between fingers, and she tries to concentrate on her own breathing, which becomes decidedly more contrived with every tick of the minute hand much to her embarrassment because she is a federal _agent_ , damn it, not a sixteen year old girl. She does her best to ignore his breathing altogether. His breathing, his heartbeats, him. Her heartbeats are sixty by sixty and she is aware of each painful, aching one.

“What if we were married?”

She rolls over to face him. In the dark it’s difficult to know how serious he’s being. Another life, another version of them, and it might have been a moment that made sense, a moment of culmination, a moment of kissing him truly and honestly. Now, she does her best to concoct a wry smile. “Please tell me you’re not proposing, Mulder.” She remembers his voice on the phone last year, too earnest for it to be anything but a joke. “Again.”

It’d be better if he had laughed. Instead he sighs, more of an exhale than anything else, really, and folds himself a little deeper into the bed. His eyes stay on her, unshaken, unfaltering. Mulder has lived so much of his life as a crusade, and it shows. She cradles her hands between her collarbones. “What if I was?”

Scully considers, chewing on the inside of her lip. Almost absent-mindedly ( _but not quite_ ), almost instinctively ( _but not quite_ ), she extends an arm, running her hand through his hair. Her thumb lingers on his temple. His eyes linger on her face. “I would tell you,” she says after several moments, “that I normally don’t marry guys after the first date.”

Now he laughs, quietly, like it’s a secret, like they might wake someone if they aren’t careful. Like they might wake something. It’s not a reassuring, calming sound ( _there is blood, so much blood, rushing through every vein, coursing through her heart, last year she was become death and now she couldn’t be more alive_ ), but it is enticing, and endearing, and enduring, and she shuffles a little closer toward him. His hand snakes up to cover her own, his fingers curling around her own.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance of that first date,” whispers Mulder, a little sadly. It breaks her heart so quick. It’s not a snap but it’s a sudden _thereness_ she hadn’t expected, a fullness she doesn’t have room for. She’s eight years old and her father shows her how to find her own pulse in her neck. Oh, there it is. Loud and hot and constant. Oh, there it is.

“Mulder…”

“Scully.”

There is so little space between them now. A few inches of mattress. Remember, she thinks, remember when in 1993 you fell asleep on his motel bed, to the lull of his voice, scratchy from exhaustion and from a graveyard, and he curled himself into the chair, and you woke up, and thought you would die from the scandal? Remember that?

How far they’ve come.

She shakes her head, trying to dislodge herself from the bed, from his legs against hers. “They’re just waiting for a reason to shut us down. To separate us.”

He nods. She realizes he wasn’t asking her for her permission as much as her forgiveness. “It’s you or the X-files, Scully,” he murmurs, and the weight of that is not lost on her.

The fact that she can see him, for a second, a fraction of a second, consider it is not lost on her either.

_vii._

It all goes to shit very quickly.

Not that she minds. Her irritation with Mulder as he ghosts his fingers across her neck at work, sneaks a kiss as she pulls yet another file on poltergeists from the cabinet, sleeps the night in her bed even though she told him a thousand times she had to work – it’s a farce, nothing more than a formality. Standard Bureau procedure. She rolls her eyes and clucks her tongue, but when push comes to insatiable shove she is right there with him, her lips on his collarbone, her hands grasping just as much as his. His bed becomes known territory. His skin becomes familiar.

The first time, she had laughed breathlessly into his neck as he struggled to make love to her with a shit arm. Every time he tried to lean on it he swore in frustration. “You’ve always been _clever_ , Mulder, I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she’d teased him, whispering into his ear. His response was beyond language.

For the most part, they are able to keep it under control. It’s like a game, something similar to hide and seek but can more aptly be described as Russian roulette. Every time she kisses him, every time she loves him, the possibility of discovery lurks, hidden behind corners, waiting under the bed, like a loaded gun. Is the safety going to be on or off this time? It’s addictive, if she’s being honest.

It helps that their relationship has always been _intense_ , for lack of better words, so the addition of the physical isn’t immediately detectable unless you have been paying very close attention. Her mother asks her once, during brunch, but her mother has been asking her that question for the past six years, so Scully doesn’t think it counts. She suspects the Gunmen might know when Frohike very unsubtly stops hitting on her every time they stop by with a case, but Mulder swears he didn’t say anything and she has incentive to believe him at face-value. There is one horrible night where she’s drunk at his apartment, wearing his sweatshirt and nothing else, forcing him to sit down on the couch so she can look him in the eye for once as she kisses him. His hand is on her leg when there’s a knock on the door. Imbued with red wine confidence, she stumbles to answer the door, and by some act of God she decides to look through the peep hole at the last moment. It’s Skinner. Mulder whisks her away to hide in his bedroom, where she sits pretending she doesn’t exist for the next fifteen minutes as Skinner and Mulder go over last minute details for a presentation he has to make in the morning to a panel regarding their yearly expenses.

Mulder sleeps until 1pm that Saturday. Skinner covers for him. All is well.

 _“I knew,” Skinner tells her a year later. “You both thought you were so smart. Mulder still had lipstick on his mouth when he delivered a case report to me once.” She nods, smiles wanly. It’s a nice memory_.

It’s not sustainable, she supposes. The way Mulder looks at her in their basement office, something rooted and raw. She’s a medical doctor, not an astronomer, but she still knows what they say about stars that burn bright. Part of her waits for the black hole. Then again, everything Mulder has ever done has always been unsustainable, has always been too much. He grew up too quick, he fought too hard, he suffered too much.

“I have loved you for so long,” he whispers to her at four am. Deliriously, she wonders if they should even be saying the word _love_ – he had kissed her for the first time three months ago ( _and she’d banged on his motel room door six years ago_ ). “God. Do you know that? I have been in love with you for so goddamn long.”

“Yes, but I loved you first,” she says, playing devil’s advocate. She suspects he’s right ( _his 1993 eyes aren’t just something she can forget_ ), but she likes their banter too much to give it up now.

“Yes, but,” he gently mocks her.

She searches for a word to describe the way he loves her. The only one that fits is _relentlessly_.

_viii._

There exists a single, solitary photo of the three of them. Byers took it, without warning or consent, as they had walked into her apartment that first night, Mulder’s arm around her, their child in her arms ( _their child, their child, their child_ ). The flash as she had stepped through the threshold after Mulder was unexpected and inexplicable; for a moment, Scully had been thrown back into the room of dust and dark, the room where her son ( _her son, her son, her son_ ) took his first breath, and she’d tensed and held him closer to her –

“Come on, guys, what the fuck,” Mulder had sputtered when he’d successfully blinked the light out of his eyes. He glanced guiltily down at his son ( _his son, his son, his son_ ), as if his hours old brain would be able to recognize the swear. “How’d you get in here?”

Frohike had scoffed. “ _How_ we’d get in here? Come on, Mulder, it’s been like ten years –“

“- I wanted to see Langley Junior for myself –“

“- we made a casserole, it’s in the fridge –“

“All right, get out,” Scully had said finally, and even though her voice was the quietest, the hoarsest by far, the Gunmen had stopped immediately at its tone. A little sheepishly, a little grumpily, they’d slunk out the door behind her, mumbling words of congratulations as they passed her.

Byers had stopped to hand her the photograph, which was still developing. All it had been then was a murky, glossy mix of greys. Vaguely defined silhouettes. Shadows. “You need to place it face down so the picture develops properly,” he’d told her gravely.

She had rolled her eyes. “Yes, I have taken a photo before, Byers.” But then she’d softened. “Thank you.” He had nodded in return and slipped out quietly.

Later, after Mulder had left to get his things from his apartment, after she had laid William ( _William, William, William_ ) down in his crib, she’d picked up the photo from the bookshelf where she’d left it, holding it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. The kindest way to describe it was and is as a mess, as a poorly executed, poorly timed portrait. Mulder’s face is halfway between asking her a question and looking up in alarm. William’s eyes are closed. Her exhaustion is impossibly visible. It’s plastered to her skin. It pulls at her bones.

Scully remembers being disappointed. It certainly won’t be the Christmas card, she’d thought to herself wryly. But there’s something about it that is both grand and intimate at the same time. The way she holds William, so unbelievably natural. Mulder’s hand on her back. It’s the first time she sees _them_ and she can’t help but marvel at it. Scully, Mulder, William. Mother, father, child. She puts it in her night side drawer.

_William, no Mulder: she takes out the photo again and again, tracing his spine with her fingernail. It’s like picking at a scab, refusing to let it heal. The rush of relief when blood flows._

_Mulder, no William: the photo collects dust in a box labeled “Keepsakes” that travels with them to every apartment she is sure will be safe enough, every house in the country he swears is the last one. She’s afraid if she looks at it, the blood won’t stop. And she can’t afford to lose any more_.

 _ix_.

Reasonably, she knows it has nothing to with her. Kersch showing up at her apartment door just as she had finally closed her eyes. The conspiracy. The men with loaded smiles and loaded guns that lie just out of reach, cloaked in just enough shadows. The suitcases in her living room. The crosshair on Mulder’s heart. None of it is her fault or frankly has anything really to do with her. It’s just the next link in a chain of events that has been unfolding for eight years, ever since she’d stepped into that basement office, ever since she’d decided to follow him, ever since, ever since, ever since.

 _Agent Mulder? I’m Dana Scully, I’ve been assigned to work with you_.

The key word here is _reasonably_. That might have been enough for her then, but now there is too much room inside of her for things beyond reason, beyond science. She clutches at his shoulders, pressing her lips to his chest, and thinks, God is punishing me. That is the explanation. She didn’t find enough time to go to Mass. She didn’t believe as resolutely as she could’ve. She didn’t go to confession enough, and surely by now the list of her sins is long and knotted and _heavy_ , so goddamn heavy.

That is the _only_ explanation, because if it’s not her fault, then it must be His, and she has too little to not have faith. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, as if it will be enough.

Mulder thinks she’s talking about before, about how she’d stood tall, the only visible fractures the shuddering of her breath, and said, “You have to go.” She feels his chin brush her forehead as he vehemently shakes his head.

“No, God, no – please, don’t. You were right. If they – it’d be stupid to stay. I’d only be putting you in danger. And William.”

 _Oh, isn’t it nice to be so highly regarded_.

The taste of _please, stay_ burns her tongue. She is suddenly afraid of what she might say, that she might beg him to forget about the men with guns, about the FBI, about the world. To just stay with her and William. She’s afraid she might convince him. To stop herself, she kisses him, violently, desperately. _This is the last time_ is a mantra that rains down from the ceiling, blows in from the window. She can feel it flooding her lungs and knows there are worse ways to drown but _God_. God.

“Come back to me,” she says finally. They are the only words she has left.

He nods. His forehead rests against hers. His hand curls around her back. “Always.” It’s the closest they ever come to vows.

And she believes him.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know if i will write anything else for x-files (hopefully i can MOVE on with my life) but i hope u enjoyed


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